Putting animals online: Does it protect or destroy?

A shark has been killed because tagging data revealed it was regularly near a popular swimming area (Image&colon; Stuart Westmorland/Getty)

Even in the digital realm, observation and conservation make uncomfortable bedfellows

“We hear a lot of talk about the ‘internet of things’,” says Etienne Benson, “and, increasingly, some of them are living things.”

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Benson, from the University of Pennsylvania’s department of History and Sociology of Science, was speaking at Digital Animals, a one-day conference aimed at examining what digital perspectives and technologies means for the future of animal protection.

Benson was describing the Sharksmart tracking system that uses data from sharks tagged by researchers to provide interactive maps, alerts and warnings – via its website and automated tweets – about shark activity near Western Australia’s beaches.

The system made headlines worldwide recently when the decision was made to destroy a shark based purely on tagging data that showed it was frequenting a popular swimming and surfing area, despite there being no visual sightings. The move sparked outrage from some sections of the media and the scientific community – the latter feeling betrayed at how its data had been used to kill the very sharks it was studying.

To Benson, the incident reveals a worrying shift in the philosophy behind the tagging of animals. Tags can be a nuisance for the animals fitted with them, and tagging has always been viewed as a sacrifice made by that particular animal for the greater good of its species. Now, argues Benson, in the case of West Australian sharks at least, the tags have become a technology of control and punishment.

Go fly zones

Also tracking animals, although for different reasons, is Thomas Snitch, whose company, Air Shepherd, flies fixed-wing drones across central and southern Africa to protect rhinos and elephants from poachers.

Snitch, a mathematician, previously worked as an analyst for the US military, studying maps of Iraq and Afghanistan to work out where insurgents were likely to have placed explosive devices. The drones are less important than the algorithms that decide where they should be flown, he says.

A continuous stream of geographical data, LIDAR scans and the movements of animals and poachers are fed into a supercomputer by Air Shepherd’s team back at the University of Maryland. Predictive models are then used to direct a relatively small fleet of drones to the right places at the right times.

Snitch’s brash, military language seemed somewhat inappropriate at an animal rights conference, even while he was demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the social and economic issues behind the ivory trade. And it is hard to argue with his results. On average, 1200 rhinos are slaughtered by poachers every year in Africa. Since October 2014, not one has been killed in areas patrolled by Air Shepherd.

Pet hate

Digital technologies change how we watch animals. Anna Frostic of the Humane Society of the United States threw social media’s obsession with cute animal videos into a serious, and often depressing, light when she explained the role they play in creating demand for exotic and endangered pets. Couple this demand with websites and networks that actually allow ill-equipped members of the public to easily purchase animals they would traditionally have had difficulty finding, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

There are now more tigers in domestic captivity in the US than there are anywhere in the wild. Similarly, she pointed to research showing that people didn’t realise species such as chimpanzees were endangered because they are so used to seeing them online, which in turn has had a devastating impact on their willingness to donate to charities and conservation efforts.

There is little doubt that networks can help raise awareness of animal protection issues. Digital Animals went further, though, by asking how digital media formats have transformed the way we view, consider and treat animals – and by considering the inadvertent damage this technology has already done.